FRIDAY,  MARCH 14,  2008

A WARNING FROM HISTORY

Arthur Herman, who, among other things, has written a superb history of the Royal Navy, believes that the forced retirement of Admiral William Fallon, chief of CENTCOM, moves us toward the right policy on Iran.  Fallon's departure is an important story that has received far too little attention by a press corps consumed with our presidential race:

WEDNESDAY'S retirement of Adm. William Fallon may mean we're finally moving toward the right policy for dealing with Iran and its nuclear program before it's too late.
Fallon leaves as head of CentCom, which oversees US operations in the Middle East. He's a fine officer and former Vietnam naval aviator. But his approach to the Middle East's most dangerous rogue state has been to avoid confrontation (as when Revolutionary Guard speedboats buzzed American warships in the Gulf and met no response) and to reassure Tehran that we have no plans for taking military action against its ongoing nuclear-weapons program - which is, of course, exactly what the regime likes to hear.

In fact, Fallon's approach, and that of our State Department recently, has been to make that action more, not less, likely.

In dealing with rogue states, diplomacy can never be a substitute for, or even the alternative to, force. It can only be effective as the extension of force - force that is a credible threat because it will be decisive if unleashed, and because it plainly will be unleashed should diplomacy fail.

Sounds right to me.  More...

...the Bush administration's long drive to bring diplomatic (as opposed to military) pressure to bear on Iran - to stop the nuclear program before it destabilizes the Middle East or worse - has been a complete waste of time. Worse, while we've diddled with diplomacy, Tehran has had five years to forge ahead with its plans.

Again, this drive explicitly abjured any use of military force. Secretary Condoleeza Rice has been reassuring the world that the United States wants a multilateral, diplomatic solution to the Iran "problem" rather than a unilateral military one, while Adm. Fallon was making similar pacific noises from Centcom.

Finally...

Force without diplomacy is sheer brutality, the law of the jungle. But diplomacy without force, or the threat of force, is an invitation to chaos - no law at all.

It's the lesson Western democracies learned in the 1930s. It's the lesson Israel is now learning in dealing with Hamas in Gaza. It's the lesson we all should have learned dealing with Saddam Hussein in the '80s and '90s, but didn't.

Five years after Operation Iraqi Freedom, people wonder how we ended up going to war with Iraq in the first place. The answer is: a decade or more of trying to use the United Nations to ward off a threat to regional stability until war was the only option left. Future historians will show this is where we are heading with Iran, as well.

Perhaps Adm. Fallon's departure is a sign that we're moving in the right direction at last. But when we use diplomacy without the threat of force, formal resolutions instead of genuine resolution, half-way measures instead of effective action - then we are drawing disaster down on our heads.

There are plenty of people who ridicule the notion that we're in a period similar to that of the late thirties.  But there are those nasty facts that get in the way of that argument, and Herman has them. 

Anyone listening?  Notice that the clock on your wall keeps going forward.

TOO SLOW IN IRAQ

At the same time, we can't be suckers for allies who don't pull their weight.  General David Petraeus, our top commander in Iraq, comes down hard on the Iraqi government for its failure to make more political progress.  His appropriate warnings will, of course, be misused by the Democrats to show that we're losing the war, since the Dems are invested in our defeat, but Petraeus is giving the kind of cold progress report that is necessary in any conflict:

BAGHDAD, March 13 -- Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

The general's comments appeared to be his sternest to date on Iraqis' failure to achieve political reconciliation.

And...

The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has won passage of some legislation that aids the cause of reconciliation, drawing praise from President Bush and his supporters. But the Iraqi government also has deferred action on some of its most important legislative goals, including laws governing the exploitation of Iraq's oil resources, that the Bush administration had identified as necessary benchmarks of progress toward reconciliation.

Many Iraqi parliament members and other officials acknowledge that the country's political system is often paralyzed by sectarian divisions, but they also say that American expectations are driven by considerations in Washington and do not reflect the complexity of Iraq's problems.

There's been a slight uptick in violence recently, and we may have more as the American presidential election approaches.  The enemy, as noted here last night, will always attempt to influence our public opinion.  The war is far from won, and can be lost by the Iraqis themselves.  It's critical that we win it, lest we show weakness and failure in a region that respects only strength.  But we can't care more about Iraq than the Iraqis do.  That is our dilemma.

THE OBAMA WATCH

Despite polls showing Hillary Clinton well up in Pennsylvania, and other polls showing her about even with Obama in a battle with McCain, analyst Peter Brown at Real Clear Politics says Obama will be nominated.  His reasons reflect the pathetic decline of the Democratic Party into the vessel created by George McGovern:

Any realistic scenario in which Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the Democratic presidential nomination assumes that the party bosses will have both the will and the power to stop Sen. Barack Obama's nomination.

But there is one good reason why they might not try, even if she is able to string together a series of primary and caucus victories: Call it liberal guilt, or call it fear of reprisal from the party's powerful black base.

Either way, it is very difficult to see the Democratic Party bosses of the 21st century -- we call them superdelegates -- overruling a (slight) majority of their constituents and blocking the nomination of the first African-American major-party presidential nominee.

Further...

Among the current leaders of the party are many more women, African-Americans and Hispanics -- but they're less diverse ideologically. The once moderate-conservative wing of the party has virtually disappeared, with millions following Ronald Reagan to the Republican Party or, these days, given the disillusionment with President Bush, calling themselves independents.

Today's Democratic leaders are the reformers who seized control of the party decades ago -- and their ideological children. They operate differently than the folks who used to inhabit those smoke-filled rooms.

After all, they have presided over a party that has -- with the exception of Bill Clinton -- generally nominated presidential candidates from the North, with views and values that are in sync with those who vote in the primaries but apparently, if election results are to be believed, not with the rest of the American people.

Finally...

The threat of a revolt among African-Americans, not to mention among young voters of all races, if Obama is denied the nomination by the superdelegates might be enough to discourage even those who see Clinton as the better general election candidate.

Without the 80 percent or more of the black vote and large black turnouts that Democrats generally receive, party candidates would be hard-pressed to win in most states.

That's why it is difficult to see, even if Clinton wins Pennsylvania and some of the other remaining states, how she would become the Democratic presidential nominee.

Do you think it's wrong to ask who'd make the best president?  Do you think that's kind of, well, so pre-sixties?  Okay, I won't ask.  I mean, what's dealing with international terror and stopping the Iranian nuclear program compared with putting a person of the accepted race or gender in the White House?  Some wine and cheese, dearies?

OBAMA'S CRACKPOT MINISTER

Still, despite his excellent chance to win the nomination, Obama is weighed down by his associations, especially his minister.  There's more fallout from the ABC report exposing the guy as a certifiable nut case.  Michael Goldfarb, in The Weekly Standards, explores the connection and explains why it will continue to hurt Obama.  It's the third story down:

Ultimately what the "Obama's Pastor" issue comes down to is the country asking, "Who is Barack Obama?" and finding answers anywhere it can. Because Obama has no real public record of his own, the country has to sift through tea leaves. The associations he chooses become relevant.

And a pattern is developing regarding those associations that's disturbing. When Michelle Obama made her obnoxious comments a short while ago, I wasn’t enormously enamored with making a big fuss about them. Her comments were the kind of shopworn, low-grade anti-American sentiments that typified liberal Ivy League grads of her generation. They sounded like a knee-jerk reflex more than the product of a real and careful analysis. Such is the nature and rhetoric of limousine-liberal groupthink.

But you combine Reverend Wright's rhetoric with Michelle Obama's and a pattern begins to emerge: Obama's inner circle seems composed of an inordinate amount of people who don’t much care for this country. Some Obama supporters may ask in response to that fact, So what? Does Obama necessarily share the views of his pastor and his wife? And what if he does?

If that's going to be Obama's supporters best defense, it's not a very good one. The views of Obama’s close relations are going to disquiet a lot of people. A lot of voting people.

That says it.  Very well.

HEAT WAVE?

The debate over global warming is, well, heating up.  It seems to me - and it may just be an impression - that more and more people are starting to ask the right questions about the "done deal" that Al Gore and others have presented to us.  It sometimes takes guts.  Those who doubt the accepted wisdom have, after all, been compared to Holocaust deniers. 

The Washington Times has a thoughtful piece on the subject, raising questions about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the lead agency driving the new religion:

In a 2001 report, the IPCC published an image commonly referred to as the "hockey stick." This graph showed relatively stable temperatures from A.D. 1000 to 1900, with temperatures rising steeply from 1900 to 2000. The IPCC and public figures, such as former Vice President Al Gore, have used the hockey stick to support the conclusion that human energy use over the last 100 years has caused unprecedented rise global warming.

However, several studies cast doubt on the accuracy of the hockey stick, and in 2006 Congress requested an independent analysis of it. A panel of statisticians chaired by Edward J. Wegman, of George Mason University, found significant problems with the methods of statistical analysis used by the researchers and with the IPCC's peer review process. For example, the researchers who created the hockey stick used the wrong time scale to establish the mean temperature to compare with recorded temperatures of the last century. Because the mean temperature was low, the recent temperature rise seemed unusual and dramatic. This error was not discovered in part because statisticians were never consulted.

And...

Furthermore, the community of specialists in ancient climates from which the peer reviewers were drawn was small and many of them had ties to the original authors — 43 paleoclimatologists had previously coauthored papers with the lead researcher who constructed the hockey stick.

These problems led Mr. Wegman's team to conclude that the idea that the planet is experiencing unprecedented global warming "cannot be supported."

This is an excellent piece, well worth reading.  Before we spend zillions of dollars to correct a problem, maybe we should do a better job of defining it, or determining whether it even exists.

MORE APPEASEMENT OF KILLER KIDS!

It's the same old story.  Faced with the menace of juvenile delinquency, the soft educational establishment backs down.  It's an outrage, a manifestation of everything that's gone wrong in this society since the Marines climbed Suribachi in '45.

Look at this, just look at it:  A kid commits a grievous crime, punishment is announced, and the softies don't enforce it.  Read it and weep:

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (AP) -- School officials have decided to go light on an eighth-grader caught with contraband candy in New Haven, Connecticut.

Michael Sheridan originally was suspended and loss his class vice president post after buying a bag of candy.

Michael Sheridan, an eighth-grade honors student who was suspended for a day, barred from attending an honors dinner and stripped of his title as class vice president after he was caught with a bag of Skittles candy in school will get his student council post back, school officials said.

Superintendent Reginald Mayo said in a statement late Wednesday that he and principal Eleanor Turner met with student Michael's parents and that Turner decided to clear the boy's record and restore him to his student council post.

Michael was disciplined after he was caught buying a bag of Skittles from a classmate. The classmate's suspension also will be expunged, school officials said.

The New Haven school system banned candy sales in 2003 as part of a districtwide school wellness policy, school spokeswoman Catherine Sullivan-DeCarlo said.

And we wonder where this country is going.  If a kid can get away with buying candy, what comes next? 

Remember, when this society collapses under an avalanche of crime, it all started in New Haven.

Fighting to the end against appeasement, I'll be back later - unless that kid gets me first.

Posted on March 14, 2008.